[The Fog Comes on Little Pig Feet] is the secret journal of Rachel Sasakian, scribbled after lights out while she crouches in a bathtub at boarding school…. Driven into a corner by the dumb rules of the school, she becomes crafty. Her father, she brags, is Norman Mailer. To escape compulsory chapel she declares herself a convert to Judaism. But the totalitarian pressure of the school mounts until Rachel's resistance is an act of heroism. The book says something true about life: Evil is not dia...

Not since Dorothy was whisked off to Oz have I encountered a Dorothy as impressionable and thoroughly sympathetic as the heroine of Rosemary Wells's "Leave Well Enough Alone." In this novel, set in 1956, Dorothy, almost 15, a policeman's daughter and student at the Sacred Heart School in Newburgh, N.Y., finds herself transported to Llewellyn, Pa. where, for the magnificent sum of $400, she is to spend the summer taking care of two beastly little girls. At first blink, Maria and J...

Marcia Mill discovers new pressures, new adjustments, new problems in her life after her father remarries. Her brilliant stepsister brings competition, so she tries to attain a higher academic standing. Her sister, Sharon, whose husband has been in Vietnam for over a year, becomes pregnant, but doesn't want her husband to know. Her father arranges for an abortion…. The first part of [None of the Above] is an interesting story of family situations and events with a stepmother and her daughter t...

The boarding-school world depicted in The fog comes on little pig feet, though not quite St. Trinian's, would probably be taken as a satirical picture if the story were set in England; as it is, I cannot be sure whether the author has exaggerated the oppression and emotional aridity of North Place and, if so, whether this is because of her own experience of school or to give bite to her story. At any rate it has acquired enough bite through first person narration. The naïve, emotional words of...

The theme [of The Fog Comes On Little Pig Feet] inevitably recalls Salinger; the disastrous first week at a posh boarding school of Rachel, fierce, funny and working-class, sent there by her sad and anxious parents to meet "nice girls from nice families"…. There isn't much of a plot; loyalty to a run-away delinquent friend, to her own scale of values, to those worried parents; these provide conflict enough. The book is tougher and more sophisticated than any English equivalent I ...

Ms. Wells writes with uncompromising honesty; the feelings of all characters [in "None of the Above"] are believably expressed and the plot concerns a vital area—the pitiful state of education in our public schools. The trouble with the story is that all its people are so unsavory. That goes double for the "heroine," a dolt who is more irritating than sympathetic. Her stepmother, a snob and a pseudointellectual, wants Marcia out of the dullard class in high school and into...

I began [Leave Well Enough Alone] laughting with delight at Rosemary Wells's marvelous re-creation of fourteenness—the fervid rejoicing over a mistake not made, the strain of drinking a Coke noiselessly in the presence of an adult one is struggling to impress, furtively removing and disposing of one's ruined stockings, only to have them returned by a smiling porter. And for those of us who grew up pious in the '40s and '50s there is that ever losing battle for goodness...

When her father remarries, doltish Marcia … finds herself out of place with her sophisticated stepmother and her whiz-kid stepsister Chris. In the five years that [None of the Above] spans, Marcia becomes more acceptable to her new family … but in so doing seems to lose herself…. Wells refuses to provide any "happily ever after" solution to Marcia's problems. An unusual and oddly affecting heroine, Marcia seems, at times, to be sleepwalking through the events of her...

[In Leave Well Enough Alone] Dorothy is … left on her own to decide the most moral course of action. Although the mystery is contrived and confusing at times with too many false or oblique clues, the characterizations are superb, especially Dorothy's "martyred" older sister who, at 20, is saddled with a baby and bunions; and, of course, Dorothy, herself, caught squarely between her Catholic conscience and ambitious nature. Wells' finest novel yet, this raises thorny ethica...

[The Fog Comes on Little Pig Feet is] fast-paced, adequately written entertainment…. Although the characters … are stereotyped and one minor character never develops as expected, Wells does successfully portray the beginnings of puberty and an adolescent's need for privacy. Rachel's obsession about getting her period, counting her public hairs … and examining her chest for signs of developing breasts are related with humor and understanding. (p. 89) Alice Mill...

The characterization [in Leave Well Enough Alone] is strong and the dialogue natural; the story is overcrowded however, with the mystery and suspense of the adult coffin, with Dorothy's adjustment to a job and a situation for which she is equally ill-prepared, and with the dominating theme of her struggles with her conscience and her reiterated but abortive promises to herself and to God that she will stop lying and meddling. (p. 40) Zena Sutherland, in Bulletin of the Center for Childre...

"None of the Above" is a sensitive novel of teen-age problems, the search for identity in a confusing world, the alien feeling within the context of an alien family, the discovery of answers to essentially unanswerable problems. "None of the Above" is well-written and the characters well-conceived. I'm not sure about the ending—sentimentally, but I don't think realistically, conceived. (p. 8)